Blender crashes on startup, why?
I found a clue here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/834254/steam-libgl-error-no-matching-fbconfigs-or-visuals-found-libgl-error-failed-t but was not happy with their solution.

I ended up reinstalling the nvidia drivers which had been removed during an abortive cuda install/removal.

sudo apt-get install nvidia-340

The version you need will be based on your graphics card and you can figure out that version with this page https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us on the nvidia site.